Category: Xbox One

Posted on

Can You Have Too Many Micro-Transactions?

A Reddit user recently posted that in order to unlock all of For Honor’s gear it would cost you over $700, and in order to unlock it all without money you would need to play one and a half hours a day for about two and a half years.  He obviously thought that was too much.  Now I am not defending For Honor, but fighting games generally have tooooons of micro-transactions for different outfits and whatnot, and you generally only unlock the stuff for the characters you play.  Also, all this gear is purely cosmetic, so the purple samurai will not fight better than the default gray one.  Still, two and a half years and $700 are big numbers for a game that you already paid $60 for.

My question is, is this a bad practice or not?  Honestly, I am not sure.  On one hand I love getting random little unlocks for playing games.  They are like little achievements, but on the other hand it is frustrating to never get what you want, and all the people that fork over the cash look awesome.  Overall I tend to be okay with it if:

  • The gear is purely cosmetic.
  • They are not always advertising it to me.  I already bought the game once don’t sell it to me again.
  • If there is still a “free” way for me to get what I want for my character.
  • Or if the game fails the first three criteria, the game needs to be free to play and that is how it makes its money.

For Honor fits the first and third of my criteria, but where it fell flat with me was that it was always trying to get me to fork over cash.  I hate that.  Save your adds for the TV.  At worst send me a note that you are having a sale, but then never mention it again.  Trust me, we are all aware that we can spend real money for checkered hats.  For Honor would have done better launching for like $30 and then skipping the single player campaign.  Then market it as a fighting game, since that is what it is, then they could have charged whatever they wanted for cosmetics and no one would have cared.  Not only that I think it would have been a hit.  Oh well, maybe it will serve as a warning to other games.  We shall see.  For me, it worked out anyway since I didn’t buy the game.  What do you think about games with a lot of micro-transactions?

Posted on

Don’t Mind Me I Am Still Just Playing Torment: Tides Of Numenera!

It has been a long time since I have actively dreamed about a game, but here we are: inXiles’s Torment: Tides of Numenera is constantly on my mind.  I am wondering how things could have gone differently on certain quests, or wondering what sort of conversations I could have had, had I made different choices.  Any time I play I am constantly finding myself talking to just one more person, and before I know it I need to go to work.  Yes, like I said in my earlier post the combat is still trash, it can be hard to look at, and it is still glitchy, but there hasn’t been a game this well written for ages, and one where I am truly role playing the way I want to.  It is a grand choose your own adventure tale, but one that truly lets you choose your own adventure.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is out today, and it should be showing up in my mailbox any time now, but I feel quite certain that it will not leave the impression on me that Torment has.  While for the most part I have been happy with most of the games I have backed on Kickstarter, Torment: Tides of Numenera might be the first game I am proud that I backed.  Which is interesting because inXile’s Wasteland 2 was the reason I stopped backing games on Kickstarter.  Maybe after I am done with Torment and Mass Effect I will give Wasteland 2 another try, but for now, I am just happy to playing the cRPG classic Torment: Tides of Numenera, and I think you should too (just try not to fight anybody).

Posted on

Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Launch Is Imminent, And I Am Ready!

It has been five years and a few days since we have had a Mass Effect game, and that one had its share of controversy, but in a couple of short weeks that wait will come to an end!  People with EA/Origin Access will start playing the game on the 17th, while the rest of us will have to wait until the 21st, and I am jonesing for it!  I will be counting down the days.  Check out the final trailer for the game above to amp up your excitement even more!

Posted on

Shmee Rides The Tides Of Numenera And Finds Joy Not Torment!

The spiritual successor to the cult classic RPG ‘Planescape: Torment’ came out yesterday, ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ by inXile Entertainment, and if my initial impressions are anything to go by, this game is something special.  For most of you that don’t remember ‘Planescape: Torment’, it was based on the weirdest parts of the D&D universe, so just exploring what the game had to offer was most of the fun, and the characters were all wonderfully written.  ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ continues this tradition.

In Torment you play as the Last Castoff of the Changing God.  The Changing God gained immortality by creating new bodies every so often then casting his old ones aside.  However when he moves from one body to the next, his old bodies gain consciousness with no memory of being the Changing God, and if they survive being fully grown infants, they become mostly normal people.  Normal people with strange daddy issues.  It turns out that a monster hunts the Changing God and his castoffs, The Sorrow.  You need to need to stop The Sorrow from killing you, and confront your ‘father’.

Most people now think of RPGs as games were you get cool loot from killing monsters, level up to better kill monsters, and then every now and then make decisions about what monsters to kill.  Torment is not that game.  That is not to say there aren’t monsters, loot and leveling up, but more that this game is about talking to people and exploring.  Even in combat it encourages you to use your skills in ways to end the fight without directly attacking the enemy.  Pretty much it is a very large choose your own adventure game, and one that is easy to get lost in.  I just started, and all I can think about is the people I met and the different decisions I could have made.

Because of all this, you will need to get a good pair of reading glasses.  This was a Kickstarter game (of which I was a backer), so while there is some recorded dialog, most of this game is text based, and there is a lot of text.  Just about every character with a name has an expansive dialog tree, and you will want to read it all in order to better inform your actions, or just not miss out on something cool.

The weakest parts of ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ are the visuals.  While the backgrounds are wonderfully detailed and strange, the character models are low-res and muddy, and even those cool backgrounds sometimes get jaggy and muted.  Also, the combat isn’t super interesting, but since combat is not the focus of this game that is okay.

There is a lot more to talk about with this game, but I am just going to say, if you like the idea of walking around and talking to people with interesting backstories, and then thinking your way out of problems, you should give ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ a try.  The fact this game is so strange and weird makes it even better.  If you want to just shoot or hit stuff, this game probably isn’t for you.  inXile Entertainment did a great job of capturing what made ‘Planescape: Torment’ the classic it is and channeling that in to Torment.  Maybe next time they can upgrade the graphics a bit.

Posted on

Shmee Enters The Wildlands With The Ghost Recon Beta!

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the more realistic version of Mercenaries 2.  Mercenaries 2 was an over the top open world action title where you overthrow a fictional Venezuelan government, and you got to pick whether you helped the Chinese or the Americans.  You overthrew the government by taking out targets.  You do the exact same thing in Wildlands except it is Bolivia, it is drugs not oil, and you can’t call down airstrikes to level entire cities.  I am not sure that it is an upgrade.

Because of the more grounded world that Wildlands (also Wildlands is not a word) takes place in it just feels kind of off.  You are supposed to be helping people, but you can jack their cars or accidentally kill them.  Now if you disrupt the local populous too much they will stop helping you out, and killing civilians ends the game, so you go around driving the speed limit and carefully shooting when in cities.  However, you do a lot of shooting, so there will be some collateral damage, and that hurts this game’s serious tone.  It is hard to have a good time after I accidentally murdered some poor farmer, and then have to reload to a save.

All is not lost though.  The world is varied and lush.  The shooting is top notch, and something tells me if you have a group that you play games with, the co-op would be a ton of fun.  So, I am not saying not to get Wildlands, I am just saying it feels different for an open world action game.  Kind of like how Mafia is different from GTA, but again the Mafia games always have those moments where the tone of the game conflict with the structure of the game.  Between For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft really has a lot riding on Q1 2017, and sadly for them, while both games seem fun, I am not sure either of them are for me.  Though if you convince all my friends to get it, I might just have to join in on some open world co-op.